Monday 12 November 2012 16.00 EST
First published on Monday 12 November 2012 16.00 EST

They're going down like flies: resignation after sacking after suspension, amid the usual welter of recriminations over payoffs and public money. No, not BBC executives. The unsung crisis in public life is that of chief constables: at least four have this year been placed under formal investigation for assorted cases of alleged misconduct.

It's been a rotten year for British policing, from the Hillsborough disaster report to Leveson's scrutiny of the curious reluctance to pursue phone hacking. One striking reason, indeed, that false conspiracy theories about a senior Tory politician spread like wildfire is surely that so many now feel it credible that the police might fail to investigate an establishment figure properly. The toxic legacy of the hacking scandal is a renewed belief that the powerful are still above the law, which can only encourage mob justice via Twitter.

So we're hardly short of reasons to be angry about policing failures on a grand scale: the urge for a well-judged kick up uniformed backsides should be strong. The puzzle, then, is how this Thursday's inaugural elections of police and crime commissioners – individuals with the power of hire and fire over chief constables – have managed to be so coma-inducingly dull. As a lifelong political junkie, never have I dragged myself to the polls so unenthusiastically or so blindly. All that stops me staying home is the gut feeling that when offered a vote, one should take it: but for whom, and what's the point?

One feels almost nostalgic now for the fear that electing police and crime commissioners would create a breeding ground for crazy hang 'em and flog 'em populists, browbeating chief constables into the sort of sordid political deals seen only in episodes of The Wire.

For what seems to be happening instead is a very British kind of politicisation: a sort of creeping managerial dullness, embodied by the wave of Westminster has-beens and wannabes standing on agendas largely cut and pasted from party manifestos. Keep bobbies on the beat, slash red tape, fight the cuts (or implement them miraculously without pain). With a few honourable exceptions, their pitches suggest little radical thinking and even less enthusiasm to challenge and question. Scanning my own ballot paper, I'm minded to ask not why projected turnout is so low, but why it isn't lower.

In principle, the dull parochialism of it all should be a necessary evil, of course, since the whole point of elected police commissioners was to bring chief constables closer to local people – although the trouble is it isn't parochial enough, since many forces cover such vast areas as to render localism virtually meaningless. Here in Thames Valley, which includes huge swaths of southern commuter belt, none of "my" candidates even lives in the same county as me. An idea pinched from elected sheriffs in small-town America has lost something in translation to these sprawling fiefdoms.

And as Sir Ian Blair, a former senior Thames Valley officer, said at the weekend, the fear is that one individual may be less representative of such a jumbled, cacophonous electorate than a police authority drawing people from several different communities. He feels a Conservative win here would intensify the argument that police resources are too concentrated in Reading or Swindon – where most of the crime is – at the expense of the villages, where most of the Tory votes probably are. Which casts an interesting light on our Conservative candidate's admirable-sounding pledge to "maintain the balance between urban and rural policing".

One might ask, of course, how far the man who led the Met through the first failed inquiry into phone hacking is entitled to a hearing on this. But leaving geography and politics aside, the worry that those who shout loudest – the sharp-elbowed middle classes anxious about burglary rates – get heard at the expense of others is still a pertinent one, especially when it comes to those victims too ashamed to lobby in public.

Surprisingly, only one of the five commissioner candidates in South Yorkshire mentions either Hillsborough or the failure to protect girls from predatory men in Rotherham in their pitches on choosemypcc.org.uk, the Home Office website catering for the hastily googling swing voter. The BBC's inexcusable moral failings over Jimmy Savile are endlessly rehashed, yet rather less is said about why the Surrey force that interviewed him couldn't collect enough evidence to prosecute.

And in Thames Valley, where the murder of Julia Pemberton by her estranged husband triggered a nationwide debate a decade ago over police handling of domestic violence, only the Labour candidate still makes that issue a central part of his pitch. There is too much anguished debate about the role of journalists in bringing victims' stories to light and not nearly enough about that of the police.

So when yet another day of BBC reporters interviewing BBC reporters about BBC reporting prompts the inevitable cry of "What about the victims?", there's more than one way to remember them. Not bothering to vote this Thursday means turning your back on the chance, however remote, to have some say in how seriously the criminal justice system takes the vulnerable and frightened – and to use those sharp elbows for the greater good. It's not too late to email your candidates and ask where they stand, either, if they have nothing publicly to say about it.

So yes, these elections are mind-numbingly dull. But just as readers of these pages were once advised to vote with clothes pegs on their noses, this time matchsticks are called for – to prop those drooping eyelids open long enough to mark a ballot paper.